A week before the Georgia Senate runoff, former President Donald Trump has no plans to appear on stage with his handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker. In fact, it’s not even under discussion.
The retired football star is traveling the state this week with a rotating cast of national GOP surrogates. But unlike Georgia’s January 2021 Senate runoff, when the former president held two rallies including an election-eve event, this time Trump has been conspicuously out of the picture.
Both national and state Republicans say it would be best for Trump to, quite literally, just phone it in for the runoff.
“I think he’d be more effective if he did it by phone,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, suggesting Trump participate in an election-eve automated call to GOP voters.
Gingrich compared the hypothetical get-out-the-vote call to what Trump did for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2021, when Youngkin kept a healthy distance from Trump throughout the campaign, but benefitted from his 11th-hour appeal to GOP base voters.
